Applicants' systems and methods relate to systems and methods for transmitting information in a wireless network wherein a central monitoring station is operatively connected to an IP network coordinator by an internet connection or a cellular connection. Applicants' systems and methods have particular application for mobile duress call systems and methods in which mobile transponders in the form of duress pendants are worn by users to provide duress coverage to the users, including but not limited to enterprise mobile duress extended coverage and remote coverage.
Conventional deployed technology requires that pendants be registered to the facilities' alarm panels, usually through keypad programming. This poses many problems, including causing a trouble condition on the alarm panel when a pendant leaves the premises. This usually also results in an undesired notification to the central monitoring station, resulting in a “cry wolf” condition, rendering the supervision capability nearly useless at worst, and a dangerous and distracting nuisance at best. Furthermore, for people who would visit multiple locations, they would have to A) have a separate pendant for each location to satisfy the pendant supervision, or B) leave all the panels in the trouble state when they are not present, or C) leave all pendants onsite, leaving personnel without a duress capability when entering or departing a premise. Sometimes this is overcome by turning off the supervision of the pendant, but this results in the pendant's “state of health” being unknown, and the protected person not knowing if they are protected with a working device and network, and provides no notification if the pendant leaves the premises.
Mobile duress pendants by nature are on the move. In one application, the pendants are assigned to employees and it is desirable that the pendants can leave the wireless network when the employees leave the network to go home, for example. An intrusion control panel can be used to monitor the pendants. Since an intrusion control panel is designed to report trouble when a pendant leaves the network, this imposes some limitations on the application of mobile duress pendants. Usually this results in the employee leaving the pendant in the facility when they leave, offering no protection outside the building. This is a major problem for banks, as one of the most vulnerable points is during a branch opening, referred to as a “morning glory robbery,” before the employee enters the bank.
A conventional method for the self test of pendants is to put the control panel that they are connected to in the test mode and test all of the pendants at once. Doing so requires a call to a central monitoring station to advise them that the system is in test mode so that they ignore the alarms. Then the button on every pendant needs to be activated to ensure that they are tested. The user then records which pendants where activated and confirms that the central monitoring station received the alarm. This is a time consuming process for the user at the location. Usually, this test is done weekly or monthly and requires that all the pendants be on site and leaves the bank (or other facility) vulnerable as all security systems are temporarily off line.